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Archive for June 22nd, 2012

By Uri Avnery*(TRANSCEND) – “We shall not be a normal people, until we have Jewish whores and Jewish thieves in the Land of Israel,” our national poet, Haim Nahman Bialik, said some 80 years ago.

**Photo: Tamar Dressler/IRIN – South Sudanese children at a protest against Israeli government directive to return home by the end of March

This dream has come true. We have Jewish murderers, Jewish robbers and Jewish whores (though most prostitutes in Israel are imported by international slave traders from Eastern Europe through the Sinai border).

But Bialik was too unambitious. He should have added: We shall not become a normal people until we have Jewish Neo-Nazis and Jewish concentration camps.

The central news item nowadays in all our electronic and print media is the terrible danger of “illegal” African migrants.

African refugees and job seekers are drawn to Israel for several reasons, none of which is an ardent belief in Zionism.

Israel and its military ally South Sudan, which gained independence in July 2011 after decades of civil war, both claim that the process has been one of “voluntary repatriation”.

While some among the first planeload of 124 people were very guarded about their feelings of returning to their new but still extremely impoverished nation, several people said the South Sudanese are being forced out.

“We had a problem with the minister of interior saying that South Sudanese should go back to their country,” said Paul Ruot Wan at a transit site outside Juba where the returnees were registered on 18 June.

Ruot worked in hotels across Israel for five years before being told he had to go back to his new country.

Like this:

Climate change can play a role in driving people from their homes into areas of conflict and potentially across borders, according to a new United Nations report.

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Millions of people lost their homes after massive floods devastated Pakistan in summer 2010 | Photo: UN

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“Climate Change, Vulnerability and Human Mobility,” based on discussions with around 150 refugees and internally displaced people in Ethiopia and Uganda in 2011, is published by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN University (UNU).

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“This report confirms what we have been hearing for years from refugees,” said the High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, who introduced the report while attending the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

“They did everything they could to stay at home, but when their last crops failed, their livestock died, they had no option but to move; movement which often led them into greater harm’s way,” he stated.

The Ethiopian government is forcibly displacing indigenous pastoral communities in Ethiopia’s Lower Omo valley without adequate consultation or compensation to make way for state-run sugar plantations, Human Rights Watch said in areport*.

**Photo: Sacca – Source: Flickr | Wikimedia Commons

The report contains previously unpublished government maps that show the extensive developments planned for the Omo valley, including irrigation canals, sugar processing factories, and 100,000 hectares of other commercial agriculture.

Government officials have carried out arbitrary arrests and detentions, beatings, and other violence against residents of the Lower Omo valley who questioned or resisted the development plans, according to Human Rights Watch report.